Innovator of the Year: Joshua Schachter, 32

Innovator of the Year: Joshua Schachter, 32

In 2001, a wonky Wall Street quantitative analyst named Joshua
Schachter had a problem. In the late 1990s, he’d started a website
called Memepool, which was a simple collection of Web links that he had
found interesting, useful, or both. Over time, as Memepool’s users
began sending in links they thought the site should feature,
Schachter’s personal list of bookmarked Web pages grew to more than
20,000 entries, far more than any folder system could handle. To bring
some order to the chaos, Schachter wrote an application called Muxway,
which allowed him to manage his links by giving each a short label, or
tag–enabling him to call up all the pages that were tagged, say,
“Wi-Fi” or “math.”

People continued to view Schachter’s list of
interesting links; but now, because of Muxway, those links were
organized around tags. Pretty soon, about ten thousand people every day
were stopping by. Schachter realized that even with (or perhaps because
of) the deluge of information available on the Web, people were still
hungry for good links, and they were interested in finding out what
others thought was interesting. He also figured that if tagging was
helpful to him, it could make storing and finding bookmarks easier for
everyone else. So with that in mind, he rewrote Muxway, and in 2003 he
launched it as a website called del.icio.us. Within a couple of years,
hundreds of thousands of people were using del.icio.us, and it had
metamorphosed into a system for organizing not just individuals
information but the whole Web. Today it exemplifies the promise of
what’s often called Web 2.0–websites and online applications that rely
on user participation to achieve their greatest value.

At its
core, del.icio.us is a bookmarking system: a place to store all those
links that don’t fit in a “Favorites” folder. But it took off because
it offers everyone what Muxway had offered Schachter: a way not just to
collect links in one place but also to organize them. As people trawled
the Web, they could tag interesting pages using whatever words they
wanted, and del.icio.us would keep track of them all.

“You
bookmark for one of two reasons: either you think you’re going to need
that page again somewhere down the road, or you don’t have time to read
it now, but you want to read it later,” Schachter says. “The challenge
is, once you’ve got all these bookmarks, how do you manage them? The
problem were really dealing with is memory and recall, and using
technology to make your memory more scalable.”

Schachter
deliberately avoided imposing any rules about how people could use
tags. He knew it wouldn’t work: “If I went in there and said, Hey,
you’re using that tag wrong, people would just tell me to fuck off,” he
says. He also knew that letting people use their own tags–instead of
choosing them from a menu he provided–would make del.icio.us more
likely to be genuinely useful. Each person who uses del.icio.us is
effectively coming up with an idiosyncratic system for classifying the
Web: an article about, say, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban might be
tagged “Mavericks” by one person, “crazy” by another, and “Mavericks”
<i>and</i> “crazy” by a third. (Del.icio.us allows users to
pin as many tags on a page as they want.) “If you’re trying to tag a
page in a way that’ll get you back there someday, you want to use your
vocabulary, not someone else’s,” he says.

Though del.icio.us has
become a way for users to collectively organize information across the
Web, it did not begin as anything so grand. Rather, it emerged as a way
to help individuals manage their own information. “For a system to be
successful, the users of the system have to perceive that it’s directly
valuable to them,” Schachter says. “If you need scale in order to
create value, it’s hard to get scale, because there’s little incentive
for the first people to use the product. Ideally, the system should be
useful for user number one.” This makes del.icio.us different from
systems that rely on what economists call “network
externalities”–meaning they’re valuable only if lots of people use
them. It was hard to get the first person to buy a fax machine, because
a fax machine is useless if you’re the only one who has one. But even
for the first person to use del.icio.us–Schachter–it worked.